No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.